Voice communication devices utilizing microphones tend to pick up background noise. This background noise may include, for example, environmental noise such as other voices or sounds, system noise such as radiofrequency noise, and acoustic echo.
Background noise caused by other voices is often present if a person is trying to conduct a call in a collaborative workspace. Collaborative workspaces are commonplace for enterprises large and small. The typical collaborative workspace provides a high touch, high communication work environment free from the traditional boundaries of dedicated office space and high-rise cubicle walls. While having a high touch, population dense work environment is desirable for maximizing collaborative face-to-face communications, the open design of collaborative workspaces creates a noisy environment that hinders collaboration/communication between onsite and offsite (i.e., remote) team members.
To address background, noise, audio communication devices in the prior art typically utilize some form of noise reduction processing which attempts to reduce the detected background noise so that only the user voice is transmitted to the remote cad participant. While current noise reduction technology can help reduce the background noise, its effectiveness is limited. Furthermore, noise reduction processing benefits only the person on the other side of the call as the local call participant (i.e., the audio device user) must still conduct the call in the noisy environment. The audio device user currently has no way to know when the environmental noise conditions have exceeded the noise reduction capabilities of their device. Compounding the problem of not being able to detect when call quality has significantly diminished is what to do once the background environment noise levels have exceeded the noise reduction capabilities. Furthermore, in addition to the limitations of the device noise reduction capabilities, users have their on unique preferences for when background noise is sufficiently high to be overly bothersome when conducting a call.
As a result, improved methods and apparatuses for addressing background noise during audio communications are needed.